Despite its computational elegancy, Jackendoff's proposal to reconcile competing approaches by postulating a parallel architecture for phonological, syntactic, and semantic modules is disappointing. We argue that it is a pragmatic version of the leading module which Jackendoff would probably prefer, but which he does not explicitly acknowledge. This internal conflict leads to several shortcomings and even distortions of information presented in the book.

In the virtue ethics of Diadochus Photice, the notion of self-rule (αὐτεξούσιον) is of paramount importance for the creative progress in one’s moral perfection. With the proper use of self-rule man can escape sin and turn himself to love. In addition, Diadochus also uses the notion of apatheia (ἀπάθεια) to indicate the way for a successful cleansing (κάθαρσις) of the soul, so that with this cleansing man can grasp the logoi (λόγοι) of beings. According to Diadochus Photice, virtue ethics must (...) not be conceived in an anthropocentric way, but in a theocentric one, and so virtue does not depend only on the ethical achievements of man, but on divine grace and on the personal relation of man to God. (shrink)

The results of two experiments, in which participants solved constructive tasks of the puzzle type, are reported. The tasks were solved by two partners who shared the same visual environment hut whose knowledge of the situation and ability to change it to reach a solution were different. One of the partners — the "expert" — knew the solution in detail but had no means of acting on this information. The second partner — the "novice " — could act to achieve (...) the goal, but knew very little about the solution. The partners were free to communicate verbally. In one third of the trials of the first experiment, in addition to verbal communication, the eye fixations of the expert were projected onto the working space of the novice. In another condition the expert could use a mouse to show the novice relevant parts of the task configuration. Both methods of facilitating the 'joint attention' state of the partners improved their performance. The nature of the dialogues as well as the parameters of the eye movements changed. In the second experiment the direction of the gaze-position data transfer was reversed, from the novice to the expert. This also led to a significant increase in the efficiency of the distributed problem solving. (shrink)

The sensorimotor account of perception is akin to Gibsonian direct realism. Both emphasize external properties of the world, challenging views based on the analysis of internal visual processing. To compare the role of distal and retinotopic parameters, distractor effect – an optomotor reaction of midbrain origin – is considered. Even in this case, permanence in the environment, not on the retina, explains the dynamics of habituation.

Eye movements play a variety of roles in perception, cognition, and communication. The roles are revealed by the duration of fixations reflecting the quality of processing in the first line. We describe possible roles of eye fixations in different temporal diapasons. These forms of processing may be specific to sensorimotor coordinations. Any generalization to other domains should be cautious.

While sharing the author's interest in the development of an action-based framework for memory research, I think the present version is neither new nor particularly productive. More differentiation is needed to describe memory functioning in a variety of domains and on the many levels of activity regulation. Above all, Glenberg's proposals seem to contradict empirical data.

Three experiments investigated level of processing effects on a variety of direct and indirect memory tasks, in the context of a processing theory of dissociations. Subjects studied words in five encoding conditions and received one of ten memory tests. In Experiment 1, four tests previously classified as conceptual showed a robust LOP effect, as did a direct perceptual test of graphemic cued recall. An indirect perceptual word fragment completion test was unaffected by LOP. Experiment 2 showed that a new indirect (...) version of a graphemic cued test was not affected by LOP. In Experiment 3, guided by a generation/recognition model, we constructed three new direct tests in which subjects identified words that were graphemically, phonologically, or semantically similar to studied words. The three tests differed in their sensitivity to study conditions, but LOP had no effect in any case, despite the involvement of deliberate conscious recollection. Contemporary explanatory frameworks couched as dichotomies do not provide an adequate account of the results. It seems necessary instead to specify the types of information activated by each encoding condition, the types of information required by each test, and how encoding and retrieval processes are modified by task instructions. (shrink)

We identify two aspects of the problem of maintaining perceptual stability despite an observer's eye movements. The first, visual direction constancy, is the (egocentric) stability of apparent positions of objects in the visual world relative to the perceiver. The second, visual position constancy, is the (exocentric) stability of positions of objects relative to each other. We analyze the constancy of visual direction despite saccadic eye movements.Three information sources have been proposed to enable the visual system to achieve stability: the structure (...) of the visual field, proprioceptive inflow, and a copy of neural efference or outflow to the extraocular muscles. None of these sources by itself provides adequate information to achieve visual direction constancy; present evidence indicates that all three are used.Our final question concerns how information processing operations result in a stable world. The three traditionally suggested means have been elimination, translation, or evaluation. All are rejected. From a review of the physiological and psychological evidence we conclude that no subtraction, compensation, or evaluation need take place. The problem for which these solutions were developed turns out to be a false one. We propose a “calibration” solution: correct spatiotopic positions are calculated anew for each fixation. Inflow, outflow, and retinal sources are used in this calculation: saccadic suppression of displacement bridges the errors between these sources and the actual extent of movement. (shrink)

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The need for the axiological determinants of cognition of law to be theoretically justified as a constituent of legal progress that includes the humanization of law makes the problem under the study relevant. The purpose of this article is to distinguish the value determinants of cognition of law. The main methodological approaches used in the study are axiological and anthropological approaches, which allow us to consider law as a valuable constituent of human life, inextricably linked with the human personality. The (...) article reveals that the modern understanding of the term “law” is characterized by axiological and anthropological approaches to its cognition; founds out that the human legal value has an integral-synthesizing character to all other values and, as a result, is embodied in the absolute legal value and inherent worth; establishes that the human dimension of law has become the result and, at the same time, the source of value-legal human understanding, which indicates the value of law and its axiological characteristics. (shrink)

I will argue that Aristotle’s fourfold division of four causes naturally arises from a combination of two distinctions (a) between things and changes, and (b) between that which potentially is something and what it potentially is. Within this scheme, what is usually called the “efficient cause” is something that potentially is a certain natural change, and the “final cause” is, at least in a basic sense, what the efficient cause potentially is. I will further argue that the essences of things (...) and changes are not features or attributes of them, but paradigms that set the standards according to which these things and changes may be judged to be natural or typical. The “formal cause” of a natural thing will be shown to be its essence in this sense: it sets the standards of typicality that apply to instances of its kind. The final cause will be shown to set the standard of typicality for natural changes. When we understand Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes in this way, it becomes clear on what basis he could convincingly argue that final causality is operative in the whole of nature. (shrink)

Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives. By Fozia Bora. The Early and Medieval Islamic World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2019. Pp. xviii + 250. $115.

According to the aspect theory of instantiation, a particular A instantiates a universal B if and only if an aspect of A is cross-count identical with an aspect of B. This involves the assumption that both particulars and universals have aspects, and that aspects can mediate between different ways of counting things. I will ask what is new about this account of instantiation and, more importantly, whether it is an improvement on its older relatives. It will turn out that the (...) part of it that is new is the notion of cross-count identity among aspects. As I will show, this notion is both dubious and unnecessary. I will end by presenting a simplified aspect theory of instantiation that does not involve cross-count identity. (shrink)

The dating of Catalepton 9 has been the central issue of scholarship on that poem. The more particular questions of the poem's authorship, the identity of the addressee, and its chronological relation to other texts, both depend on and contribute to ascertaining the date of composition. The clearest exposition of the problem remains that by Richmond. Evidence provided by Catalepton 9 falls into two categories: literary and historical. Literary evidence encompasses two kinds of data: various formal features of the text (...) and intertextual links with other poetry. While the poem's metre, language and style suggest a relatively early date of composition, the close textual parallels with the Eclogues, interpreted as borrowings from rather than sources of Virgil's poetry, point in the opposite direction. Historical indications are likewise ambivalent. On the one hand, it seems likely that the addressee is M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus and, further, that the occasion of composition is his triumph in 27 b.c.. On the other hand, the allusions to his military achievements are both too vague and exaggerated, and, if taken literally, do not fit well our Messalla at any particular point of his career. Richmond, following Birt and followed by Schoonhoven, believed that at least some of the historical references are ‘intended to be prophetic’. More recently, Peirano has attempted to explain this lack of precision by arguing that Catalepton 9 is not a real-life panegyric but a later biographical fiction, the real focus of which ‘is to be found […] in the relationship that the poem constructs between Virgil and his patron’. (shrink)

The article is focused on the project of a new vision of history by Z.B. Simon, who proposed his own strategy for creating a "critical ontology" of the historical process and the epistemology of comprehending the past associated with it in the light of the radical challenges of the scientific-technological development. It reveals that the works of this author can be considered as a response to the crisis of substantialist theories of historical development and the situation of the overwhelming dominance (...) of the narrativist attitude in the approach to the study of the past today. Reflecting in a meta-critical way on the importance of the emergence of a new type of "quasi-substantial" ontology of history that should reject the "evolutionist" paradigm and the idea of the movement of humanity as a single subject towards a teleologically predetermined goal of social development, Simon outlines the contours of this kind of "radical break" with the past and its pluralistic understanding in the light of the future. Unprecedented breakthroughs of scientific knowledge can, in his understanding, give rise to many new subjects of history, who, in their aspiration to the future, should also offer radically different horizons of the past interpretation. In this perspective, Simon considers it possible to revive the role of the universalist vision of the past on the basis of its various critically justified reconstructions. In the works of this author, an attempt to justify the importance of creating a "critical ontology" of history within the boundaries of the analysis of knowing the past, characteristic of the contemporary stage of the evolution of Western thought, is clearly revealed. His new epistemology of history, emphasizing the role of "insight" inspired by individual and collective "sublime" historical experience, can be interpreted as an attempt to synthesize the views of A. Badiou with a narrativist platform combining the strategies of hermeneutics and analytical philosophy of history. (shrink)

The report of B. M. Hessen at the I All-Union Congress of physicists. The Congress was held in Odessa from 19 to 24 August 1930. At the plenary meeting B. M. Hessen, made a report on methodological issues of quantum physics, the relationship of physics and philosophy. Mechanistic materialism in his time came to replace the scholastic physics. But he could not solve the problems of development and specificity of forms of movement. B. M. Hessen believed that the development of (...) the basic concepts of natural science (matter, space and time, motion, wave and particle, pattern and randomness) coincides with the approach of dialectical materialism. (shrink)

Although Steeles & Belpaeme's (S&B) results may be useful for development of technical devices, their significance for behavioral sciences is very limited. This is because the question the authors asked was “Why do people use similar words in a similar way?” rather than “How can similar words stand for similar experience?” The main problem is not shared word usage, but shared references.

The game Gls(κ) is played on a complete Boolean algebra B, by two players. White and Black, in κ-many moves (where κ is an infinite cardinal). At the beginning White chooses a non-zero element p ∈ B. In the α-th move White chooses pα ∈ (0.p)p and Black responds choosing iα ∈ {0.1}. White wins the play iff $\bigwedge _{\beta \in \kappa}\bigvee _{\alpha \geq \beta }p_{\alpha}^{i\alpha}=0$ , where $p_{\alpha}^{0}=p_{\alpha}$ and $p_{\alpha}^{1}=p\ p_{\alpha}$ . The corresponding game theoretic properties of c.B.a.'s are (...) investigated. So. Black has a winning strategy (w.s) if κ ≥ π(B) or if B contains a κ -closed dense subset. On the other hand, if White has a w.s., then κ ∈ [h₂(B). π(B)). The existence of w.s. is characterized in a combinatorial way and in terms of forcing. In particular, if 2κ = κ ∈ Reg and forcing by B preserves the regularity of κ, then White has a w.s. iff the power 2κ is collapsed to κ in some extension. It is shown that, under the GCH, for each set S ⊆ Reg there is a c.B.a. B such that White (respectively. Black) has a w.s. for each infinite cardinal κ ∈ S (resp. κ ∉ S). Also it is shown consistent that for each κ ∈ Reg there is a c.B.a. on which the game Gls(κ) is undetermined. (shrink)

My dissertation seeks to understand our concept of moral claim-rights---rights of one person against another. It achieves this understanding by doing two main things: analyzing our concept of moral claim-rights in terms of our concept of moral duties; and discerning the role in our moral thinking of our concept of moral duties. Along the way, various views of, and issues surrounding, these two concepts are considered. ;Roughly, my view of our concept of moral claim-rights is this: X has a moral (...) claim-right against Y that Y do A if and only if whether Y has a moral duty to do A depends on whether X would desire that Y do A were X instrumentally rational and in possession of full relevant information. Suppose Boris has promised Alice that he will paint her house. She thus has a moral claim-right against Boris that he do so. Does this mean Boris has a moral duty to paint her house? No, since Alice might not desire that Boris paint it . ;Generally, my view of the role of our concept of moral duties in our moral thinking is that, as we think, moral duties are some, but not all, of the considerations bearing upon what one ought morally to do. More specifically, "ought morally" has a two-filter structure---an agent ought morally to perform one or another of those actions available to her which survives two successive stages of filtering. The first stage of filtering involves trading-off considerations of moral duty against those of overall goodness, while the second stage involves trading-off considerations of overall goodness against those of personal interest. In illustration of the first stage, where moral duties are involved, suppose that Alice can make some net contribution to the overall good by slapping Boris. Since Alice has a moral duty not to slap Boris, it is morally impermissible for her to do so unless the contribution she can make to the overall good is quite large. (shrink)

This paper’s core concern is Boris Groys’ theory of the total art of Stalinism, which is devoted to rewriting Soviet art history and reinterpreting Socialist Realism from the perspective of the equal rights between political and artistic Art Power. The aim of this article is to decode Groys and the total art of Stalinism, based on answering the following three questions: 1) why did Groys want to rewrite Soviet art history? 2) How did Groys re-narrate Soviet art history? 3) (...) What are the pros and cons of his reordering of the total art of Stalinism? Groys offers an effective paradigm that could rethink two theoretical genres: a) other Socialist Realisms inside or outside the Soviet bloc, during or after the Soviet era; b) the aesthetical rights of political artworks before, during and after the Cold War, and the historical debates about art, especially about art for art’s sake, or art for political propaganda. However, Groys’ total art of Stalinism and its core theory of the Socialist Realism frame hides some dangers of aestheticizing Stalin and Stalinism. (shrink)